The Summer I Learned to Fly

by Dana Reinhardt

  He put the guitar away in its case. Jasper, or maybe it was Christian, took Molly, the girl with the ring in her lip, by the hand. They ran into the ocean and fell over backward into the waves. She was wearing cutoff jeans and a white V-neck T-shirt. He had on cargo shorts and a plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off. They came up for air and he grabbed her around the waist. Laughter rolled from the ocean back up to where I stood next to Emmett, wondering what I was doing here.

  I would never be that girl. I would never swim where there was nobody certified to rescue me from an undertow. I’d never jump into any body of water fully clothed. I doubted that any boy would ever take my hand like that, run beside me, and then pull me toward him into the waves, laughing, grabbing on tighter.

  “That’s a good one,” Emmett said to Finn. “Top stuff.”

  “Thanks, little man.” Finn squatted down, placing his guitar in its case. He looked up at Emmett, squinting into the sun. “I wonder, though—it might be a tad dark? Not sure it’s what folks want to hear when they’re shopping for diapers and frozen pizzas.”

  “Dark is good,” Emmett said. “Sad is good. It makes people want to do better.”

  Finn smiled and finished latching the case. He slung a knitted bag over his shoulder and held his hand out to me. “Robin. It’s a pleasure.”

  He did a little bow then turned to leave. Emmett and I sat down at the surfboard table and watched him scramble up the rocks and disappear. The others were all in the ocean or down at the water’s edge. I reached into the sand and buried the cigarette butts they’d dropped right where they’d been standing. Some were still smoldering.

  “I wish I had a talent like Finn’s,” Emmett said. “It’s better than money. Or a house. Or a car. Or anything, really. If you’ve got a talent, if there’s something you can do and do it well, all the other stuff will follow.”

  I didn’t want to point out the holes in Finn’s knit bag and in his shirt, that it hardly seemed his talent held the door open for great things, but I understood Emmett’s point. I wished for that too, for something spectacular about me.

  “Where do you know all these people from?” I asked.

  “Around.”

  I recognized this as the kind of answer you give when you’re avoiding the question. I recognized it because I’d just started trying this kind of answer out on Mom.

  But why was he avoiding my question? What was he hiding?

  I decided to go with something he wouldn’t mind my asking. “What’s a busker?” I said.

  “Someone who sings for money.”

  “Isn’t that a singer?”

  “I guess it’s someone who sings for money on the streets. Or in front of the supermarket, which is where Finn tends to do his busking.”

  “Which supermarket?”

  “The Safeway.”

  We never went to the Safeway anymore. Between what we took home from the shop, Fireside Liquor, and Greenblatt’s Grocery two blocks west on Euclid, we covered all the bases. I suddenly missed the aisles of frozen desserts and the cheap plastic toys stacked next to the flu and cold medicines. That was how long it had been since I remembered being there with my mom—since I was young enough to bargain for some crappy toy while pink with fever.

  “So that’s what he does with his talent? He stands outside the Safeway and sings for spare change?”

  “That’s what he does now,” Emmett said. “The Safeway is a temporary stop. He travels the world on that spare change. He’s just earning enough here so he can keep moving on.”

  Just then the group emerged from the ocean. Molly and the boys who had pulled her into the water shook out their equally shaggy hair.

  I’d removed the food from Emmett’s backpack and spread it on the surfboard, but I’d left Hum zipped up inside. For one of the first times ever, I felt self-conscious about my rat.

  Cigarettes were cool. So were lip piercings. Tattoos. Unguarded swims in the ocean.

  Pet rats? About that, I wasn’t so sure.

  They ate standing up, barely pausing to swallow. Mom always insisted on chairs while eating. If she caught me snacking from the refrigerator she’d yell at me, and because of that, a stolen swig from a carton of milk or a piece of meat pulled from the carcass of a chicken while standing with the cool refrigerated air in my face was one of the most delicious tastes I knew.

  With a chorus of laters and see yas, they departed.

  “Cheese rind?” Emmett picked it up and then dropped it.

  “No, but I know someone who might find that appetizing.”

  I freed Hum. He raced up and down the surfboard tabletop before he spotted the rind. Maybe Emmett was right about him needing room to roam.

  We sat looking out at the ocean. There was just so much of it, and it never failed to take my breath away. Looking at the ocean gave me the same sensation I’d get staring at a sky full of stars—that I was small. Like the way a math problem reveals its undeniable truth, I knew when I stared into this sort of endlessness that my life didn’t count for much of anything. And knowing that, that I was nothing but a speck, I felt pretty lucky for all that I had.

  “Are you thinking about going for a swim?” Emmett asked.

  I laughed. I couldn’t have told him what I was really thinking because I didn’t have the words to explain. All I knew was that I was happy sitting next to him, happy to live right where I did with this beautiful, endless ocean.

  “I’m thinking I’d rather not,” I said carefully, not wanting to seem too cautious.

  “Whew. Me neither.”

  “Because there’s no lifeguard?”

  “No. Because I’m a terrible swimmer.”

  “How come?”

  “I never got around to learning.” He looked at me. He was searching my face the way I searched the ocean. “Teach me?”

  Nobody had ever asked that of me, that I be the teacher. I looked away. “Sometime, maybe. Sure. But not here.”

  We played with Hum. Emmett taught him to fetch. I’d never have believed Hum capable of such a trick, but he learned it quickly from the rat master himself. And next, Emmett promised, he’d teach Hum to come when called.

  I didn’t own a watch and I didn’t care about time. There wasn’t anyone or anything waiting for me. It was just another day at the beach.

  Of course, had I known what was happening while I was sitting at that surfboard table with Emmett, I’d have run all the way home. Or I’d have never left the house in the first place. Better yet, I’d have gone in to work that morning.

  But all of that was magical thinking. There wasn’t anything I could have done to prevent what happened, short of some random act that changed all the random acts that would follow.

  I knew the theory about the butterfly flapping its wings in the jungle. How everything happens because of the flapping. But I didn’t live in the jungle. I lived in the middle of California on a jagged edge of continent.

  I was smaller than a butterfly. I was a speck.

  What happened had nothing at all to do with me, with what I did or didn’t do, but that wasn’t how it felt at the time.

  the in-between

  He walked me home. I still didn’t know if this was on his way or out of his way to wherever it was he lived. There was still so much I didn’t know.

  When I got to my block I saw Swoozie sitting on the front stairs of our house. This didn’t strike me as unusual. My first reaction was to smile. Swoozie had a way of making me feel happy.

  For a few seconds I dwelled in that marvelous in-between. In the steps before I reached her, my day was still about a private cove, a boy with a cartoon face, a rat retrieving a macadamia shell, a poem on a guitar. It hadn’t yet become that terrible day.

  “Birdie!” she called. And there it was in the way she said my name, a hysteric lift. The -ie rising like a fire alarm.

  She stood up and smoothed out her maroon shop apron. She was collecting herself.

  She threw her fleshy arms around me
.

  “There’s been an accident.”

  She released me, took my face into her hands, looked at me with watery eyes. “It’s Nick.”

  It’s terrible to say, but I’ll say so anyway, because it’s true, and because I punished myself enough for thinking it afterward. What I thought as she spoke those words was: Thank God.

  It wasn’t Mom. Fate hadn’t conspired to take both of my parents from me. Thank God.

  Swoozie squeezed me tighter. “He was on his Vespa. He was taking a curve in the road, too fast maybe, I don’t know. The tire. The rear one. It blew out.”

  When Swoozie released me from her grip I turned to Emmett. To pull him in to me like that boy did to Molly in the ocean, to hang on to him as the ground began to disappear from beneath my feet. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Because when I turned around to reach for him, he was gone.

  indigo night

  I stayed home with Swoozie while Mom was at the hospital.

  I didn’t feel like talking, so I went up to my room. I stared out my window. The sun was going down. The day at the beach had taken place a lifetime ago.

  Our street looked deserted. Just how I felt. Mom wasn’t home to comfort me. Emmett had disappeared right as I needed someone to reach for. And Nick. Beautiful Nick. Where had he been going? Why had he been in such a hurry? What would happen to him? Was he conscious? Was he in pain? Was he going to be okay? Was he leaving me for good?

  Nick had to be okay. Nick was perfection.

  Nick was forever.

  I leaned out my window as far as I could without losing my balance. It was a balmy indigo night. An in-between color.

  I noticed Swoozie’s Porsche parked out front. Even the hood had a dent in it. I wondered why she hadn’t parked in our driveway until I looked and saw Mom’s car.

  I opened my door and went downstairs. Swoozie was sitting on the couch knitting. Right where I’d left her.

  “Where’s Mom?”

  She put down her needles and said gently, “You know she’s at the hospital, Birdie. I told you so. Now can I get you some tea? I’m having some with rose hips. I find it calms the nerves.”

  “Why’s her car here?”

  “Oh.” Swoozie picked up her needles again and went back at the brown and orange mass of yarn in her lap. “She was too upset to drive. She got a ride to the hospital.”

  I sat down next to her, suddenly seized by exhaustion. I’d gotten too much sun. I should have worn sunblock.

  I watched her hands work the needles, and their rhythm and precision lulled me into a state of almost-sleep. My eyes were open, but they weren’t seeing, like how when you stare at an object for too long you lose focus and can no longer see it for its shape.

  “Are you going to tell me about the boy?”

  I sat up. “What boy?” I asked stupidly.

  “The boy who hightailed it out of here soon as he saw me.”

  I stretched out on the couch facing our fireplace and put my head on Swoozie’s lap. She moved the yarn out of her way to make room. This position worked. I didn’t want to have to look at her, at anyone, and I was so thoroughly tired. I felt like those little kids on TV who fall asleep in the car, or at a party, and are carried to bed in the arms of their fathers.

  “His name is Emmett.”

  “That’s nice. Pretty.” She picked up my hair and ran it through her fingers. She separated it into strands and slowly began to braid it.

  “I should warn you, Birdie,” Swoozie said. “Your momma’s fit to be tied. She couldn’t find you, and you left no note.”

  “So?”

  “So she was distraught. About everything. Maybe it got all jumbled together. When things feel like they’re spinning out of control, sometimes you need to fixate on something, and she chose to fixate on where you’d gone. I told her not to worry, that I’d wait here for you, and she should go on to the hospital. But she kept on yelling that you should have left a note.”

  I thought about getting up and writing one right then and timing it earlier in the day in the top left corner like Mom always did to her notes. Then I could have blamed her for not finding it. It wasn’t a bad idea. And I might have done that. But it was too late. Swoozie was working my hair like that yarn and I was losing the battle against sleep.

  The slamming of a car door jolted me out of Swoozie’s lap. We stood and raced to the front door, opening it to glimpse the taillights of a silver car rounding the corner and Mom walking slowly up the front steps.

  She looked pale. Old. Her eyes were bloodshot and puffy.

  “He’s going to be okay.”

  Immediately I imagined him walking out of the hospital, sliding glass doors opening for him. I saw him stepping into the shade of the maple trees that lined the street out front. I saw him looking up into the sun and smiling. I saw him shaking his head like he was casting off a bad dream.

  This is not how Nick left the hospital.

  He did not walk out the doors because he lost his right leg. But I didn’t know this. Mom decided to wait until morning to break the news to me.

  I couldn’t let myself think about what might have happened had he not gone out and bought that helmet. And he’d never have bought the helmet in the first place had he not fallen in love with Becca. So that day I saw her outside the window in her peasant skirt was the day the butterfly flapped its wings in the jungle. Becca saved Nick’s life. She was an angel.

  Becca hadn’t been with him on the bike. She had a job at a clothing boutique that wasn’t as generous with its lunch breaks. Nick had gone off to eat alone. To watch the waves that making fresh pasta kept him from surfing.

  She was by his bedside almost every minute of every day that followed. That’s where I finally introduced myself to her and she told me how much she’d heard about me, how much Nick loved me.

  He loved me.

  That night Mom held on to me on our front steps. She took in several deep whiffs of my hair. She whispered to me that she’d worried. That I’d gone and disappeared without leaving a note. That she thought we had an understanding. That she was too tired to argue, but that we’d talk more after getting some sleep.

  She went to bed. Swoozie went home. After I’d been so tired, sleep avoided me. I stared at the wallpaper in my room and wondered when it had happened that I’d outgrown it. The circus elephants and colorful balls didn’t comfort me or make me feel at home—they served only to remind me of the things I needed to change about my life. Yes. I’d start with the wallpaper.

  I turned over. I buried my face in my pillow.

  Why had Emmett run away? Why hadn’t he said goodbye? Where had he been going? Couldn’t he see that something was wrong? Hadn’t it occurred to him that maybe I’d need a friend? Did he even understand friendship?

  And Nick. Perfect Nick and his lime-green Vespa. I thought of the day he took me for a ride. How I’d climbed on the back without a helmet. Nothing had mattered more than being with him, being seen with him. I’d waved at that school bus even though I knew in my heart nobody was watching.

  Nobody cared but me.

  done

  Swoozie ran the shop for the next few days, and I helped her out. It was better than sitting in the hospital waiting for updates on Nick’s surgeries. I tried my best to make pasta. I summoned up everything Nick had taught me. I replayed his lessons. I thought of his patience, his smile, the way he’d make a crater with the flour and crack the eggs into it, the way he took hold of what the pasta machine spat out to check for firmness and width before cutting it to size. While my pasta came out more or less looking right, I knew that it couldn’t possibly taste as good as Nick’s.

  Mom picked up groceries on her way back from the hospital and cooked dinner every night. We didn’t say much to each other. Mom was tired. I didn’t want to know the details. I couldn’t bear the thought of his leg. What do you do with a lost leg? Where does a leg go that is all done living?

  Luckily, Mom didn’t seem to want to talk much either, s
o we ate in silence, with only the melancholy sounds of her favored Irish folk record in the background.

  At night in my room I held Hum in my lap and I reread Dad’s Book of Lists. I knew it by heart, yet somehow I hoped I’d find a new list somewhere in its pages. A list of ways to fight back, or grab on tighter, when it felt like everything was slipping away.

  I started the project of removing my wallpaper. I peeled it slowly and only in the spots behind my dresser or the headboard of my bed so that Mom couldn’t see what I was up to.

  And while I was alone in my room at night, I began my own list.

  A list of Things That Are Suddenly Clear:

  Mom is dating somebody.

  Whoever drove that silver car was close enough to Mom to be there when she was too upset to drive herself. Who does this for you but someone who loves you? Someone who you love back?

  I don’t know Emmett Crane.

  Or at least, he wasn’t who he claimed to be, not that he claimed much about himself. The boy I thought I knew would have come back to check on me. He wouldn’t let so much time go by.

  I’d watched enough TV in the lonely afternoons after school, before there was a cheese shop to go to, to know that there were boys who lied, who knew how to say just the right thing or give you just the right look. Boys who could make you feel a way you thought you didn’t deserve to feel.

  So I was done.

  Done with him. Done with feeling. Done with the beating of my heart.

  the jingle of the bell

  By the next week things were starting to feel like a new version of normal. Mom had returned to the shop. Swoozie had hired a replacement for Nick. “Only temporary,” she said. “Until Nick gets back on his foot again.”

  Maybe because it was too early to joke, or maybe because this girl was not Nick yet took over most of his tasks with ease, I hated her at first sight.

  Her name was Veronica and she was reedy and tall, with a short dark bob, severe bangs, and a permanent whisper of a voice. I’d like to say that she was mean, or cold, or at the very least indifferent, because that would justify why I was so rude to her, but she was tremendously sweet. She also knew her food. The daughter of two chefs from New York City, she’d come to the Central Coast for its bounty. Mom had once told me that we grew about one-fifth of all the nation’s food, but I never quite believed that, because I was too committed to the idea that nothing about where I lived mattered to the rest of the world.